Pamela Villoresi

Pamela Villoresi — Biography

The daughter of a cloth merchant from Prato and a German mother, Pamela Villoresi began her artistic path with acting lessons at the Teatro Metastasio before Giorgio Strehler brought her into the company he founded, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, in 1975; she achieved major success around the same time with the television drama Marco Visconti. In 1978 she won a Grolla d'oro for her role in Marco Bellocchio's Il gabbiano, and her stage career later earned her the Eleonora Duse Award.

Villoresi has performed in more than a hundred theatrical productions and more than thirty films, and is best known for playing Viola in Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (2013); her other film credits include Splendor (1989), Evelina e i suoi figli (1990) and I Killed Napoléon (2015). From 1990 she occasionally worked as a stage director and television presenter, and in 2010 she stepped into politics, running in the Lazio regional election in support of center-right candidate Renata Polverini, though she was not elected.